Company employees increasingly use their choice of wireless devices to carry out mobile business processes. IT departments are therefore faced with the challenge of centrally managing several mobile platforms simultaneously.
When a wireless device is issued by a corporation to an employee the corporation may choose to limit certain functionality on the device in order, for example, to reduce the risk of exposure of corporate data on the wireless device. This may be done, for example, through information technology (IT) policies. An IT policy is a set of rules that dictates the allowable or unallowable functionality of a device that operates on a network. Accordingly, an IT administrator can use IT policy to ensure that all devices comply with certain rules, and are limited to certain functionality. For instance, the IT administrator can use IT policy to allow the use of certain features on a device, specify certain security settings for the device, specify applications that are allowed to execute on the device, and the like.
Device manufacturers and vendors are interested in delivering wireless device management solutions that are specific to their own devices and that support their own product range and platforms. An organization wishing to deploy wireless devices from more than one manufacturer is faced with implementing and managing multiple management systems. These systems allow an administrator to manage devices over-the-air, including activating devices, distributing software and applications, locking or wiping devices, enforcing and resetting device passwords, setting IT policies, and managing optional mobile applications for end users.
Application of configuration and policies by a wireless device management system to a group of wireless devices is a complicated endeavor. Such application action is made more complicated when the wireless devices are of differing types and platforms, where the configuration and policies are implemented in differing ways dependent upon the type of wireless device or platform and operating system.
Furthermore, the user and/or the enterprise network may have different requirements for each of the user's accounts on the different devices and the enterprise network might impose different policies, permissions and guidelines for each device type even though the accounts on each device belong to the same user.
Current implementations of policy management across platforms take several approaches. One approach is to take a set of policies and configurations for a first platform and convert those policies and configurations into a second set of policies suitable for a second platform. This approach can be cumbersome and error prone, since one of the platforms may have more or fewer features than the other or there may not be a direct relationship between features across the different platforms.
Another approach is to manage configurations for wireless devices in “silos”. Specifically policies have sections specific to each platform, for example iOS configurations, Android configurations, Windows mobile configurations. In other words, the management system comprises multiple sub applications or “silos” that work independently of each other. In this approach an administrator may have to duplicate configurations across platforms i.e. the same policy configurations may have to be created multiple times which makes future maintenance error prone, particularly if new device types or platforms are added. Furthermore the administrator needs knowledge of the peculiarities of the various platforms and devices and very little will be presented as “common” across all platforms.
Thus a system and method for reducing complexity in implementing different configurations and policies on different platforms and types of wireless devices is desirable. The system may further be able to present configurations in a device agnostic manner allowing an administrator to focus on mobile device management rather than device and platform idiosyncrasies.